Comment on Anon questions our energy sector
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 year agoSolar with Battery grid storage is now cheaper than nuclear.
If the demand goes up I have some doubt, also, mining for Lithium is far from being clean, and then batteries are becoming wastes, so I doubt you would replace nuclear power with this solution
I guess in some regions it could work, but you’re still depending on the weather
you know that grid storage does not always mean “a huge battery”, you can also just pump water in a higher basin oder push carts up a hill and release the potential energy when you need it…
Pumped storage is a thing yeah. But might just as well go full hydro, if you’re doing the engineering anyways.
I feel like we’re missing the part about “push carts up a hill”, which involves virtually no serious engineering difficulties aside from “which hill” and “let’s make sure the tracks run smoothly”. See: the ARES project in Nevada
You don’t need lithium. That’s just the story told to have an argument why renewables are allegedly bad for the environment.
Lithium is fine for handhelds or cars (everywhere where you need the maximum energy density). Grid level storage however doesn’t care if the building you house the batteries weight 15% more. On the contrary there are a lot of other battery materials better suited because lithium batteries also come with a lot of drawback (heat and quicker degradation being the main ones here).
That’s through, density doesn’t matter much when it comes to grid scale.
What battery technologies are you thinking of? Zinc-ion? Flow batteries?
They’re currently bringing sodium batteries to market (as in “the first vendor is selling them right now”). They’re bulky but fairly robust IIRC and they don’t need lithium.
If you’re thinking of the portable battery marketed as ‘solid state’ then that was a scam - a teardown revealed it was just lithium cells
Nah, I’m thinking of sodium-ion batteries. That’s 1990s tech and is currently in use for grid storage. Several manufacturers are currently bringing car-ready Na-ion batteries to market and there seems to be one production car using them in China (a version of the JMEV EV3, which I hav enever heard about before).
Now, Na-ion is still less mature than Li-ion and that Chinese car gets about 17% less range compared do the Li-ion version.
Yeah, lithium mining and processing is extremely toxic and destructive to the environment. On one hand, it’s primarily limited to a smaller area, but on the other hand, is it sustainable long-term unless a highly efficient lithium recycling technology emerges?
iii@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Would love to see a source for that claim. How many 9’s uptime to they target? 90%, 99%
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Uptime is calculated by kWh, I.E How many kilowatts of power you can produce for how many hours.
So it’s flexible. If you have 4kw of battery, you can produce 1kw for 4hrs, or 2kw for 2hrs, 4kw for 1hr, etc.
Nuclear is steady state. If the reactor can generate 1gw, it can only generate 1gw, but for 24hrs.
So to match a 1gw nuclear plant, you need around 12gw of of storage, and 13gw of production.
This has come up before. See this comment where I break down the most recent utility scale nuclear and solar deployments in the US. The comentor above is right, and that doesn’t take into account huge strides in solar and battery tech we are currently making.
iii@mander.xyz 1 year ago
That’s stored energy. For example: a 5 MWh battery can provide 5 hours of power at 1MW.
What uptime refers to is: how many hours a year, does supply match or outperform demand.
This is incorrect. Under the assumption that nuclear plants are steady state, (which they aren’t), to match a 1GW nuclear plant, you need a 1GW battery, with a capacity of 1GWh.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 1 year ago
My math assumes the sun shines for 12 hours/day, so you don’t need 24 hours storage since you produce power for 12 of it.
My math is drastically off though. Assuming that 12 hours of sun, you just need 2Gw production and 12gw of battery to supply 1gw during the day of solar, and 1gw during the night of solar, to match a 1gw nuclear plants output and “storage.”
Seeing as those recent projects put that nuclear output at 17bil dollars and a 14 year build time like, and they put the solar equivalent at roughly 14billion( 2 billion for solar and 12 billion for storage) with a 2 - 6 year build timeline, nuckear cannot complete with current solar/battery tech, much less advancing solar/battery tech.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is old news now! Here’s a link from 5 years ago. forbes.com/…/new-solar--battery-price-crushes-fos…
This is from last year: lazard.com/…/2023-levelized-cost-of-energyplus/
As to uptime, they have the same legal requirements as all utilities.
I was pro nuke until finding out solar plus grid battery was cheaper.
iii@mander.xyz 1 year ago
Source (1)
The project is 1 GW of solar, 500MW of storage. They don’t specify storage capacity (MWh). The source provides two contradicting statements towards their ability to provide stable supply: (a)
And (b)
Source (2) researches “Levelized cost of energy”, a term they define as
It looks at the cost of power generation. Nowhere does it state the cost of reaching 90% uptime with renewables + battery. Or 99% uptime with renewables + battery. The document doesn’t mention uptime, at all. Only generation, independant of demand.
To the best of my understanding, these sources don’t support the claim that renewables + battery storage are costeffective technologies for a balanced electric grid.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes.
But then you added the requirement of 90% uptime which is isn’t how a grid works. For example a coal generator only has 85% uptime yet your power isn’t out 4 hours a day every day.
Nuclear reactors are out of service every 18-24 months for refueling. Yet you don’t lose power for days because the plant has typically two reactors and the grid is designed for those outages.
So the only issue is cost per megawatt. You need 2 reactors for nuclear to be reliable. That’s part of the cost. You need extra bess to be reliable. That’s part of the cost.